Anti-Scroogenomics: A Keynesian Celebration of Christmas

Gabriel Mathy

No 2024-01, Working Papers from American University, Department of Economics

Abstract: Scroogenomics (Waldfogel 2009) alleges that Christmas gift-giving is inefficient, due to the recipient of the gift being better able to spend money on themselves than someone else could, creating a deadweight loss. However, this ignores the seasonal nature of Christmas, which falls in a slack time in the depths of winter. The additional spending on presents has a stimulative effect, lifting incomes when additional income is valuable. The seasonal boost of Christmas is often lost in seasonal adjustment, but it is significant. I also show how declining family size also reduces gift-giving for Christmas, potentially biasing estimates of the income-elasticity of Christmas as in Waldfogel (2023).

Keywords: Keynesian economics; Spending Multiplier; Christmas (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E12 E21 Z12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pke
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1U8tP5kLHPWevigAU2 ... OBm/view?usp=sharing First version, 2024 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:amu:wpaper:2024-01

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from American University, Department of Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Thomas Meal ().